Bigass Update

It’s been a while since I’ve written a real blog post, so I’m going to do a bit of a roundup here. Brace yourselves.

WAYLAND STATUS:

Thanks to the work of Chris “devilhorns” Michael, AKA “The Man With Two First Names”, Wayland client support in E18 is a go.

Wayland clients DO:

• Display normally
• Use E focus models (sloppy/click/pointer)
• Receive keyboard/mouse input, including keymap inheritance
• Dynamically update keymaps
• Correctly perform window actions including moving, resizing, maximizing, closing
• Display popup menus normally
• Allow interaction with popup menus

Wayland clients DO NOT:

• Minimize (not implemented in Wayland protocol)
• Fullscreen (un-fullscreening not implemented, so this was disabled to prevent complaining)
• Use EGL when rendering (wait a couple days)

Videos:

EFL:

Carsten “rasterman” Haitzler has written a new scaling algorithm for OpenGL images in Evas so that they will render more smoothly.

Cedric “King of B0rkers” Bail has spent most of this development cycle breaking things as usual working to dramatically reduce memory consumption, and Edje objects are now almost 50% smaller than they were a few months ago.

Terminology has, after less than a year, reached v0.3 on 26 March 2013. Since then, there have been improvements in:

• Man page existence (Panagiotis “Godfath3r” Galatsanos)
• Media playing
• Tabs
• Text reflow (Boris “billiob” Faure)
• Not crashing
• Command line parameters
• Creation/usage of edje objects as widgets

Meanwhile, a mild engineering war came and went between a Polish engineer at Samsung using QT and a French engineer at Samsung using EFL. TL;DR: EFL test case starts 3 times faster and uses 30% less memory, but QT is probably easier to write with due to the immaturity of our Elev8 project.

Rafael “RGB” Antognolli has taken up the mantle of managing our stable releases, and there was a flurry of packaging done the week of his inaugural 1.7.6 release (9 April 2013). Ubuntu users can still find the official EFL PPA here, and users of other distributions probably don’t need as much hand-holding.

Infrastructure:

Thanks to the combined efforts of the so-called gitsvn elimination team (Tom “TAsn” Hacohen and Daniel “asdfuser” Willmann), we have recently moved most of our currently active projects to our new git server. The transition was mostly without incident, and they’ve also switched us from Trac to Phabricator. Some stragglers are still living in the past and using Trac, but we expect to lock that soon and finalize the switch. Anyone wanting to join the new age can find our bug tracker here.

In addition to this, Stefan Schmidt and Daniel “asdfuser” Willmann (The German Coalition of Efficiency and Excellence) have set up a number of Jenkins installations to stop Cedricvarious people from constantly breaking builds. Interested readers will note I am currently dominating the leaderboard to the point that I have been accused of locally build-botting my own commits.

Enlightenment:

Most surfaces (menus, popups, window border frames, startup splash, DND images) have been flattened onto the compositor canvas. This means that we are now able to do neat things with image proxies on that canvas, such as the deskmirror widget I blogged about yesterday. All of this is now the simple case of taking pixel data which will be rendered in one place and then also rendering it in another place, made possible by the scenegraph workings of Evas. It also means generally faster interaction with these objects since we no longer have to wait for X roundtrips when trying to move/resize/configure them; users will see a more dramatic improvement here during the E19 development cycle.

Other related improvements of note:

• Options for automatic screen locking/unlocking based on bluetooth device availability with l2ping (Cedric “King of B0rkers” Bail)
• Various mixer fixes (Jérémy “jeyzu” Zurcher)
• More work on systemd session support (Cedric “King of B0rkers” Bail)
• Desk flip animations are now theme-defined and much smoother; also added new and gratuitous “zoom” animation
• More crashing

At this point, E18 is nearly feature-complete, and we are expecting its release within the next few months.

This entry was posted by e-releasemanager.

• April 26, 2013
• Uncategorized
• 9 Comments